The Obama campaigns went further. Building on the Dean campaign, two successive Obama campaigns raised millions in small-money donations, creating purpose-built Facebook-like social networks and using them to recruit highly connected supporters to work their way through their social graphs, contacting friends and friends-of-friends to pitch them on donating and voting.

But both times, Obama took office and immediately shut down these grassroots networks. The Obama governance style is big on closed-door, back-room horse-trading – Obama came out of Chicago Democratic Machine politics, after all – and this is fundamentally incompatible with having a bunch of true believers running around waving the flag, making categorical statements about which compromises are (and are not) acceptable.

Governing in tandem with a grassroots is a hard problem. The best example we have of this is the Tea Party, which, despite the big-money backers who bankrolled it, is composed of people who are genuinely passionate about politics and are serious about insisting that the politicians they backed act in accord with their principles.

Leaving aside my political differences with the Tea Party, it’s fair to say that this has been a mixed bag for Republican lawmakers, whose caucus has been responsible for a congressional deadlock that’s run on for years, so that it’s become normal for vital US governmental agencies to shut down and send everyone home until a budget can be passed.

When you let regulators and politicians bully you into excluding the public from their own institutions, alienating the public that you need on your side to stave off the next round of cuts — and the next.

In the story of market-driven public institutions, it’s we, the public, who are the angel investors. We paid to keep the archives growing, to put a roof over the museum, to amass and catalogue all of our nation’s cultural treasures (and the treasures of many other nations). The internet now makes it possible for those institutions to reach wider audiences than ever before, at lower costs than ever before – once their collections are digitised. When Siemens or another big company comes along to digitise our investments, they are the VCs putting in late-stage capital after we’ve borne all the risks, sometimes for centuries. If our management team – led by David Cameron, the self-styled MD of UK plc – offers these investor-come-latelies the lion’s share of the equity (that is, access to those treasures) for their paltry, late-stage capital, then he is in gross dereliction of his duty to us, the shareholders.

But of course, this is a stupid story. We don’t invest in public service institutions because we want them to be profitable. We invest in them because we want them to be good. Galleries, museums, archives and libraries tell us who we are. Schools and hospitals tend our minds and bodies. They are not businesses. We are not shareholders.

We have private archives, private schools, private healthcare, and private libraries. They cream off the easiest, most profitable, least onerous part of the public service remit. As austerity tightens and market logic crushes our institutions, many have become private/public hybrids, charging for some of their services, or selling off some of their treasures, or forcing the public to fit within the metrics demanded by the zealots of UK plc.

This is suicide. There is no amount of capitulation that will save your institution. If your archive charges the public to access its own memories, who will argue to keep it funded when the next round of cuts comes along? People who can’t afford to pay for your archive won’t stand up for it. People who can afford to pay for archival services already have private firms to serve them – why would they vote for their tax money to support another for-pay service?

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Blackstone audio has produced a professional, DRM-free audiobook of my 2003 novel EST, a novel about jet-lag, conspiracies, management consultants, crypto-contracts and P2P that William Gibson called “Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar — a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)”

Warren Ellis called it “just far enough ahead of the game to give you that authentic chill of the future, and close enough to home for us to know that he’s talking about where we live as well as where we’re going to live; a connected world full of disconnected people. One of whom is about to lobotomise himself through the nostril with a pencil. Funny as hell and sharp as steel.”

As with my other books, Audible refuses to carry this title because I won’t allow them to use DRM on it. You can get it at Downpour, where all audiobooks are DRM-free. I’d really appreciate it if you’d share this with your audiobook-loving friends and encourage them to vote with their wallets for businesses that let artists choose whether their works should be locked down with DRM.

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I was delighted and honored to find that my stories “Petard” (from Twelve Tomorrows) and “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (from Hieroglyph) (excerpt) made the cut (both have also been selected for several of this year’s Year’s Best anthos, for which I am extremely grateful!).

For me, the publication of the Locus List always marks the day when I fill in my Hugo nominations ballot, using it to jostle my memory and figure out which works I want to put forward. If you’re interested in my own eligible works, they’re the two stories above (best novelette and novella, respectively), “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free” (best related work) and “In Real Life” (with Jen Wang) (best graphic novel).

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Consumerist’s Kate Cox has turned in a long, excellent, in-depth review of my book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, really nailing the book’s thesis. Namely, that extremist copyright laws don’t just mess up artists, but actually endanger all our privacy, freedom and whole digital lives.

Doctorow draws two bright lines connecting copyright law to other major issues: government surveillance, as shared by Edward Snowden; censorship by private companies; and the necessity of free expression to civil and human rights.

Copyright claims are often used as a silencing tactic, where a party with power issues a takedown claim to get content from a party with less power removed from the internet.

For example, Doctorow cites copyright takedown notices issued by police departments demanding to have videos of their officers committing illegal acts taken down on the grounds that the police, not the person with an iPhone who recorded them, have copyright on the videos. Or takedown notices issued by the Church of Scientology to have removed articles from opponents who used leaked internal documents to criticize the organization.

“There are almost never penalties for abusing the takedown process,” Doctorow notes. “It’s the measure of first resort for rich and powerful people and companies who are threatened by online disclosures of corruption and misdeeds.”

Likewise, intermediary companies become gatekeepers of what end users may and may not consume — because they don’t want to get sued. So they fall into the “notice and takedown” scheme, and pass it all along to you. And that includes possibly having your entire broadband connection throttled or hijacked if a copyright holder doesn’t like what a user of that connection has been doing.

Because they have the right, and the ability, to keep an eye on you if you’re anywhere in the ecosystem: using a computer, phone, or internet connection that you didn’t build out of string yourself.

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I sat down for an interview with the RiYL podcast (MP3) at NYCC last fall. We covered a lot of material that I don’t get a lot of chances to talk about, particularly the relationship between personal politics and big-P politics. Listening to it again, I’m very satisfied with how it turned out.

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It’s that time again! School is out, but I’m still working, so the kid came to the office with me, just in time to record a new podcast. This year, Poesy performs a stirring rendition of Jingle Bells, with dirty words!